How often does violence against gays occur?
The topic comes up in many discussions, and I’m wondering what the facts are.
It’ll be tough to come up with numbers 'cause :
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Not all crime is reported.
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Not all crimes against gays are reported as ‘hate crimes’ (IIRC Matthew Shepards’ case was prosecuted as a murder, not as a hate crime. Locally, two men were shot with dart guns as they exited a gay bar, the two men who were convicted in the assault were convicted of assault, not of a hate crime, although they had no motive other than gay bashing, to shoot the other guys - didn’t know them, had no dealings with them, weren’t trying to rob them etc.).
but here’s some links for your perusal:
http://www.pflag.org/press/shepard.html
http://www.channel4000.com/news/stories/news-970803-141113.html
stats are here: http://www.hrc.org/issues/hate/stats.html
http://www.nvc.org/stats/hc.htm
And, keep in mind the “not all crime reported” issue - I’d be surprised if our resident gay posters here didn’t have personal stories of some physical attack/threat of an attack, which was most likely not reported.
I recall back in college days, walking up a steep incline w/my friend Ginger, we stumbled, grabbed onto each other, started laughing, a car load of fine young gentelmen drove by shouting out ‘fuckin’ lesbians!’ Was that an assault? no. Was it gay bashing? I’d say so.
According to this site http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/99hate.pdf, in 1999 there were 3 killings, 1 rape, 181 aggravated assaults, 386 simple assaults, and 471 intimidations in 1999 motivated by bias against homosexuals.
From the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force comes this press release dated February 2001:
Esprix
Thanks for the links. As Wring points out though, this is only counting those incidents reported as hate crimes.
Specifically I am trying to figure out the risks of physical assault to an openly gay man because he was gay.
For example, when I worked in New York and stayed late, walking through the Port Authority was quite scary. I had resigned myself to eventually being mugged, figuring my chances were about 1 out of 10 per year. That fear characterized my behavior.
What I’m trying to figure out are the odds (roughly of course,) that a gay man will be assaulted because he’s gay. If we apply the above numbers, I think we are going to get an unrealistically low number.
How much of a threat is this?
How, if at all, does it affect behavior?
Is it a fear that’s lived with every day, or like being struck by lightning, just a remote possibility that doesn’t concern normal day to day activity?
In other words, how big a problem is it, and how does it affect gay men today?
Keep in mind Scylla, too the dis-incentive to report crime (and I’m speaking specifically of the Brandon Teenan story here), That sort of story doesn’t need to have happen frequently in order for the chilling effects to occur.
Perhaps to find out - hang out at a gay bar or two and ask? see how often you get hassled?
Wring:
Amish I got out here, not to many gay bars around, though.
Besides, I’d be too chicken to go to one. Knowing my luck, some freak accident would occur. Maybe my car would get stolen and I’d have to call my wife to pick me up. “But honey, I was just doing research!”
I’m not a macho, flaming heterosexual, so sometimes I get mistaken for and even shouted at as a homosexual. Suppose it were to cross the line and become a physical assault?
Would that count as gay-bashing?
Even though i’m straight?
In my opinion , it should.
Sorry for the hijack.
Yes, it is still considered a hate crime, and should be. Whether someone is gay or not, attacking them as if they were, is a hate crime.
It made me more hostile. I was attacked in 1997 as I was coming home from a business meeting. Seven kids. Around noon on a Friday in front of about at least a half dozen witnesses. I was shaken by the attack, and carried pepper spray for the next year.
Scylla, I think that there are a few inherent problems when defining this sort of thing.
First of all, what would you call gay bashing? Verbal harassment, threats, physical assault, or all of the above? I have been subjected to things ranging from evil looks to attempted rape because of my sexual orientation- would all negative things that have been done to me because of my lesbianism be considered gay bashing?
Furthermore, are we to consider “gay-acting” straight men who are bashed to be in this category? Closted people?
Worth keeping in mind is that many times, particularly in the past, gay people simply did not report gay bashing for fear of further harassment from the authorities.
Big problem the next- when determining risk, it helps to have a context. Behavior, area of the country, race, class, and expression also can come into play. Depending on these things, a gay guy in rural Maine can be relatively safer than someone in NYC.
Personally, Scylla… I can’t live my life if I think I’m going to be the next Matt Shepard. I can’t be afraid of it, I can’t let it curb my everyday behavior. Which is not to say that I do things that are bloody stupid- it’s just that I live my life as openly as I can where I feel I can.
I’ve been fortunate in never having been the victim of successful anti-gay violence. However, the local Queer anti-violence project Dire Enfin la Violence reports that they receive one call from a victim of anti-Queer violence in Montreal per week.
To specify: I was almost gaybashed one night in not such a good part of town; however I got out of there and it was all good. I’ve also had various unfriendly comments shouted at me.
To follow up, most hate crimes statutes of which I’m aware specify “real or perceived” sexual orientation and/or preference.
Man, you are going to have a tough time getting to the bottom of this one. I can only explain why through a few anecdotes, which doesn’t help on the surface, but which I think may prove to be demonstrative of some of the things that are going on out there which are going to make your research extremely difficult.
Case #1. A fellow high school student allegedly begins to explore homosexuality in Southern Virginia. Supposedly, while meeting with another man (not, as best I can tell, a student), the two were spotted, identified, and attacked by several classmates. The guy committed suicide within three days. Details were confused, denied, and covered up by friends, family, and of course the perpetrators. Within days of the fellow’s death, a dozen disparate rumors were circulating about the student and his supposed assailants, all confusing and contradictory. There was police questioning, but no charges were leveled. It seemed to me at the time that nobody was trying too hard to find out what really happened.
Case #2. Closeted friend assaulted at Iwo Jima Memorial, Washington, DC. At the time, nobody had any idea of his persuasion and that’s just the way he wanted it. He manufactured a story, explaining that he was mugged, and that was accepted as fact until fairly recently, long after he had come out. He never reported the crime to the police, and it is long past the statute of limitations, even if the dude knew his assailants. He says he does not.
Case #3. Another friend of mine, walking in a park in DC with a partner, assaulted by five other men. Five people were injured, some severely. Since the two “victims” happened to be highly trained in hand-to-hand combat, and one was still serving in a military capacity, no report was made to the police. Later, one of the assailants, we’ll call him Van Gogh, was informally identified at a bar in DuPont Circle. He elected to leave the scene rather than recover a missing item currently in the lost-and-found section of a freezer somewhere in the vicinity.
The thing that strikes me is this: a majority of my gay male friends have experienced some sort of assault, either verbal or physical, at some point in their lives. I don’t have a lot of gay male friends, but out of say, six close ones, at least four have some sort of story to tell. Several of my non-gay friends have been inadvertently involved as well. In Northern Virginia, gay-bashing appears to alive and well, and being both a political and a military town, a significant proportion of cases must go unreported.
Please don’t mistake the above as some sort of statistical analysis; it is merely an attempt to show why such an analyisis will be difficult in the extreme to quantify with any accuracy.
I’m a bit ashamed to have been friends with this person, but my old roommate told me of some things he did that might have been interpreted as ‘gay bashing’ about 11 years ago in Oklahoma City, basically he assaulted and robbed several people in a homosexual neighborhood, he quit when somebody retaliated by putting a brick through his windshield when they saw him cruising the area.
OK, here’s the part that is a bit weird - I would really hesitate to call them ‘hate crimes’. He was not particularly homophobic and he claimed his primary motivation was not hatred of gays, but simple personal gain and reduction of risk. He chose gay targets because they were less likely to fight back, more likely to be carrying a lot of money (though I wonder if this would be true of any club-goer), and if it was reported to the police the local police were less likely to investigate it as a robbery and just blew it off as another gay-bashing.
I think the reasons you listed as to why someone would pick a gay target as opposed to a straight one are the very definition of hate crime. He picked him because he was “weaker,” specifically, he was less likely to report the crime. If the target was picked because of that inherent “weakness,” there’s a hate crime involved.
My friend Randy was murdered in Kansas City, Missouri a few years ago. We never actually found out if it was a hate crime, as the authorities really didn’t seem to care that a faggot got killed, so it was never really investigated. I suppose they find charred bodies by the riverbank that can only be identified by dental records every day down south…
Esprix
Interesting responses. Thanks. It doesn’t look like it going to be possible to generate a meaningful number for the chances of being gay bashed.
So, let me try the next best thing. How big a concern is this for our gay posters?
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being you think it’s as unlikely to happen to you as getting hit by a meteor, and 10 being a virtual certainty where does your fear of being physically attacked fall?
Secondly, how has this fear changed your life, if it has?
And for purposes of any willing to respond, let’s leave rude comments and such out of it for the time being (not that these aren’t valid,) and stick with the physical safety criteria.
suggest that you add some time frame, too, as in:
how likely do you think that you’ll be physically attacked due to being gay within : your lifetime? the next year? the next 8 hours? (to better get a grip on how pervasive it is)
I suspect that you’ll find the answer to be similar to your experiences in the big city - that assumption that it was gonna happen sometime within a relatively close time frame. and it would, of course, significantly affect how you live your life.
I also suspect that we’ll hear that the issue also effects life choices, such as ‘do I want to relocate and if so, where?’